'The Sorcerer's Apprentice' - A Little Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing — Dark Emu Exposed

Jan 15

Jan 15 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice' - A Little Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing

Early in 2019, when I first came across a copy of Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu at a friend’s house on a Saturday morning, I started to read it, not expecting much. But I was fascinated. Here was a version of Australia’s history that I hadn’t heard about. I knew most of the players in Pascoe’s book - Mitchell, Sturt and Robinson; even Curr and Beveridge I had some vague knowledge of.

But why didn’t I know of all their observations of Aboriginal ‘farming’? Why had I been educated in the belief that Aboriginal people had been nomadic hunter gatherers, who had survived successfully, without agriculture, for tens of thousands of years on this most inhospitable of continents?

But then, with a little adult reading, research and cross-checking, it soon dawned on me that here was a ‘hoax’. Dark Emu was an ‘Indigenous Chariots of the Gods’ and Bruce Pascoe was our very own Eric Von Daniken.

And that is fine, I rationalised. Who cares if adults read a ‘trashy page-turner’ and then argue light-heartedly about the book’s veracity? It was just a good yarn, and if it incites us Australians to revisit our Colonial and Aboriginal history for a refresher course, well and good I thought. I threw the book to the side and thought no more of it…….until.

In mid 2019, I became aware of the impending publication of Young Dark Emu for use in our schools. I could clearly see the dangers that this version posed, of being a political tool for the indoctrination for our children, the most vulnerable members of our society. Young Dark Emu, would be used to warp the minds of school kids into believing Aboriginal people were sedentary ‘farmers’; and with its over-weighted emphasis on colonial violence, massacres and dispossession, the book would only make our children despise and hate their ancestors and their country.

Hence, the Dark Emu Exposed website was born, in an effort to debunk the Bruce Von Pascoe Hoax and hopefully save our next generation of Australians from a dangerous, politically inspired project that threatened to divided our country and cause much future mental anguish.

But was I being paranoid and over-reacting to the potential for mental and practical harm that Dark Emu could do our young people and our society, once those young people graduated and entered into our society’s positions of influence? No, I do not think so; and the trends in events are beginning to bear out my fears. Consider the following.

Fig. 1 - Ross J Wissing, PhD Student, School of Architecture & Built Environment, Deakin University, Geelong, Victoria - Source 2018

In 2018, PhD student Ross Wissing co-authored (Ref. 3) a paper presented at the Remaking Cities : 14th Australasian Urban History Planning History Conference, RMIT Centre for Urban Research, Melbourne, Victoria, entitled,

‘A tale of three cities : food in Aboriginal, European and Chinese Geelong’.

Now dear reader, please brace yourself for some quotes from ‘Dr to be’ Ross Wissing’s paper,

‘Djillong, the place where modern day Geelong stands, has been an urban centre for millennia.’ (see Rebuttal #1 below);
‘At the time of European colonisation, the traditional owners, the Wadawurrung, lived in low-density houses and gardens in settlements as large as most other sedentary communities across the world.’ (see Rebuttal #2) [hold on, it gets worse!];
‘The Aboriginal City - Contrary to common belief, before European contact, Aboriginal Australia contained cities in south west Victoria that were at least 10,000 years old that could service a population of 10,000 people (Builth, 2002). Thus, Aboriginal ‘cities’ are among the oldest and, prior to the Industrial Revolution, largest in the world’. (see Rebuttal #2) [please take a moment to recover while you pick yourself up after falling off your chair] ;
‘Villages of over 500 people occupied on a seasonal, multi-seasonal or permanent basis were a common observation of early European explorers and travellers in early European settlement Victoria. Such was evident not just in the south west of Victoria, but also in other parts of Victoria around Cape Otway (Pascoe 2007).’ (see Rebuttal #3);
‘While the Wadawurrung erected their settlements working with the underlying ecological processes, the Europeans who followed did not. Whether it is retrofitting existing suburbs or building new ones, it is now acknowledged that several of Geelong’s suburbs need to change in their ecological perspectives, values and characteristics.’ (see Rebuttal #4);
‘The Kardinia Creek Living Station… was the winter residential settlement for the Wadawurrung Balug for at least 5,000 years (Lane, 1991a), quite probably over 30,000 years (Canning, 2009; Canning & Thiele, 2010) and maybe 40,000 years (Lane, 1991a).’ (see Rebuttal #5);
‘…traditional Chinese crop yields gave returns of twenty to thirty times the amount of seed sown, whereas in medieval Europe, returns of three to four times were the average.’ (see Rebuttal #6);
‘Until recently, Aboriginal people were seen as hunters and gatherers.’ [Ed: They still are - it is only Pascoe who says they are not - see Dr Ian Keen] - [our emphases]

**Fig. 2 - ‘conscious design’ according to Ross Wissing - see his paper page 14.**

‘…the formation of Permaculture, [is] the contemporary Australian approach to the conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems. This is well illustrated in Figure 8.” - [Ed: Great. Just what modern Geelong workers need - ‘sustainable’ permaculture based on forced labour. I wonder what the Geelong Labour Unions and WorkCover would have to say about ‘Dr to be’ Wissing’s suggestion that we use foot powered wooden pumps.]
(original Figure description : ‘Fig 42. The wooden foot-power of China, being used to propel the wooden-chain irrigation pump.’ Ross Wissing’s Figure 8: `…the simple yet efficient foot power seen…where a father and his two sons are driving an irrigation pump, lifting water at the rate of seven and a half acre inches per ten hours … (Source: King, 1911, p.78, Figure 42)’

Ross Wissing’s full paper can be read here : A tale of three cities: food in Aboriginal, European and Chinese Geelong

The worry is that young Australians, tertiary educated in the hard ‘sciences’, who are happy to use Bruce Pascoe’s writings as credible references in their PhD dissertations, are now entering the work-force into places of influence.

‘Dr to be' Ross Wissing, a graduate of the School of Architecture & Built Environment at Deakin University (Geelong), is described in the cover sheet of his paper as having,

‘tertiary qualifications in horticulture, environmental management and landscape architecture.’

His career prospects (called nowadays, in true reality-TV emotional jargon, ‘a professional journey’) are quite possibly likely to be in the local government, land developer consultancy, Aboriginal advocacy or academia areas. One wonders what complications, delays and difficulties developers, builders, farmers and householders will have in the Geelong area in future in getting planning and building approvals if their projects need to reviewed by a local government assessor with the same views as Ross Wissing, who writes,

'A key sustainability question for Geelong residents in the twenty-first century is how people can utilise intensive gardening techniques such as those of the Chinese, to meet a most fundamental human need of food, where they live… Like nineteenth century Aboriginal and Chinese approaches to cities and food, to enable a sustainable Geelong in the future we need to work with both ecological and human universal processes. Today, both are most evident to people in their home backyard’ - (ibid., p.15) [our emphasis].

Will the day come in Geelong where no house gets a building permit unless the plan includes a veggie patch?

Editor, Dark Emu Exposed

________________________________________________________________

Rebuttal # 1 - Aboriginal people did not live in ‘an urban centre’ in pre-colonial times. [our emphasises in bold].

Definition : ‘An urban area, or built-up area, is a human settlement with a high population density and infrastructure of built environment. Urban areas are created through urbanization and are categorized by urban morphology as cities, towns, conurbations or suburbs. In urbanism, the term contrasts to rural areas such as villages and hamlets; in urban sociology or urban anthropology it contrasts with natural environment. The creation of early predecessors of urban areas during the urban revolution led to the creation of human civilization with modern urban planning, which along with other human activities such as exploitation of natural resources led to a human impact on the environment.- Wikipedia

Rebuttal # 2 - See a list of the population numbers for the world’s cities and settlements in 1750 or 1800 (City Columns 4 & 5 respectively here from bottom of first page. Based on Wikipedia data here.

There is no sign of either Geelong or Djillong in the list. Other cities around the world at this time include, Cairo (with 200-300,000 people), Guangzhou (400-800,000), London (675-865,000) and Birmingham (23-73,000). Estimates for the Aboriginal population of Victoria at First Contact are unknown, but some put the figures at maybe, 30,000-60,000 for the whole of Victoria, with maybe some 10,000 in the Western & Port Phillip region. In 1837 there were 275 Wadawurrung, so we could double that to say, 500 as the pre-contact, pre-smallpox epidemic population of the Djillong area (Ref. 1). A population of 500 in no way allows Ross Wissing to claim his, ‘among the worlds largest city’ status for Djillong, unless he is of course a graduate of the Bruce Pascoe School of ‘Just make-up numbers and hope no-one checks.’

Rebuttal # 3 - One irritating aspect, amongst many, of Ross Wissing’s paper is his lack of proper referencing.

It is hard to believe he is a PhD candidate, as he doesn’t seem to have passed his Basic Citations 101 course. For example, for his claim of ‘villages of over 500 people’ he just cites as his source,

(Pascoe, B. (2007) Convincing Ground: Learning to fall in love with your country. Aboriginal Studies Press.),

but doesn’t cite the page number. So to check his claim, we have had to literally wade through Pascoe’s 2007 book trying to find the actual reference. All we came up with was something on page 41 - 42 of Convincing Ground, which reads,

‘One of the great myths of Australian life is that southern Aboriginal people were nomads who did not build houses more elaborate than skimpy windbreaks. The truth is that stone, turf and bark houses were common in the district. On 28th January 1836, soon after Gellibrand had arrived in Port Phillip, he was venturing only a few miles from the bay where his party ‘fell in with about 100 native huts. [Pascoe quotes here - “TF Bride(ed), Letters from Victorian pioneers, Trustee of the Public Library, Govt Printer 1898 p.284”]. It is only a passing reference and reported with no great surprise. Obviously it was common to find such large settlements, probably representing a resident population of around four to six hundred people perhaps more. It is important to note the extent of this housing and the permanent occupation it represents.’ - (ibid., p.41-42) -[our emphasis].

We checked Pascoe’s page 284 citation in our 1983 edition (Lloyd O’Neil Pty Ltd Publishers) of the 1898 Letters from Victorian pioneers and found that page 284 has nothing to do with ‘Gellibrand’ or ‘100 native huts’. Instead, we found an entry by Gellibrand on January 27th 1836 on pages 9 to 15 of our 1983 reprint of TF Bride’s book [this is not a criticism of Pascoe’s method - he may have been citing the original rather than a later reprint such as ours, but with Pascoe you never quite know!]. Gellibrand descibes his long walk from Western Port Bay, across the Mornington Peninsula, to Port Phillip Bay to near Arthur’s Seat and then some 80km all the way up along the shore to the Yarra River and the small settlement of Melbourne. Quite a monumental walk, which took Gellibrand’s party 4 days in the height of summer. What a perfect opportunity it would have been for Gellibrand to observe Pascoe’s ‘commonly found,’ ‘permanent Aboriginal settlements’ with a ‘residential population of four to six hundred people’ in their ‘houses’. Only he didn’t.

We have checked what Gellibrand actually wrote in the reference that Pascoe cites, and therefore what Pascoe is basing his claims on, during these four days of travel, with respect to the natives and their huts and we have selected all the sentences where Gellibrand mentions, ‘natives’ and/or their ‘huts’ and abridged this as follows :

**Fig 3 - Indicative sketch of approximate route Gellibrand took - Western Port to Port Phillip Bay and then Melbourne through the land of the Boon Wurrung.**

‘Thurs 28th Jan 1836 - ‘…we landed [on the beach at Sandy Point - Western Port] and saw many tracks of the natives upon the Beach…[A]fter we had walked about 9 miles…[while searching for water, some of our party] had fallen in with about one hundred native huts and near the huts had discovered water. We then…proceeded [to where they were] and in about a quarter of an hour come to a few water holes surrounded by thick scrub…[the next day] we came upon a salt water creek which lead to Port Phillip Bay. We found a fire burning at two native huts and every appearance of their having been occupied the previous night, and on the beach we found tracks of natives proceeding towards Arthurs’s Seat…[W]e proceeded…about six miles, and came to more water holes and native huts. [On 30th Jan.] we started…before day light…[along the shore but which we] now quitted…and got upon high land…on a native track and the advantage of following those tracks is soon experienced, this track continued along the margin of the hill and ultimately lead us to the beach and near the Beach we found a few Native huts and one native well. [W]e saw a dog on the Beach…and then [it] turned into the Bush, from which we concluded that the natives were at hand…we saw the tracks of several Natives on the Beach…we reached the River [The Yarra]…[and] a Boat manned with blacks came down the river. We hailed them and after explaining where we had come from, and who we were, they came to our assistance…they immediately proceeded with us to the Settlement [Melbourne] [which] consists of about a dozen huts built with turf on the left bank of the River Yarra Yarra.‘ - TF Bride (ed), Letters from Victorian pioneers, Trustee of the Public Library, Govt Printer 1898, (1983 edition - Lloyd O’Neil Pty Ltd Publishers) p. 9-15

Our reading of Gellibrand’s account is that, during a four day trek through the south east section of the Boon Wurrung lands, he only saw, tracks of maybe 10, 20 or 30? natives, evidence of occupation of only two huts (actual fire burning) and did not see any actual natives until he reached Melbourne where some assisted his entry into the settlement. Pascoe described Gellibrand’s record of the 100 huts as, ‘It is only a passing reference and reported with no great surprise’ , because most likely, the huts were deserted and not occupied at all during this period (no fires are reportedly on, and no-one is seen and no abandoned possessions are mentioned). To us, it just sounds like a vacant camp that was used for seasonal tribal meetings, or perhaps it was occupied by a large number of family groups during a particular food collecting activity in the local area.

**Fig 4 - A properly researched and written history of Port Phillip Aboriginal peoples**

Interested readers are recommended to buy Dr Gary Presland’s book, First People, if they want a well researched and fascinating description of the lives of the Aboriginal peoples of the Port Phillip region around the time of First Contact in the 1830s and 40s.

Dr Presland has spent over forty years researching the Aboriginal and natural histories of the Melbourne area, unlike some other writers who just seem to ‘make stuff up’ based on little or no real evidence.

Dr Presland writes of the Boon wurrung camps (‘settlements’ and ‘permanent occupation’ in Pascoespeak), whose lands Gellibrand had passed through, that the largest camps typically may have had twenty to thirty people in them (See Fig. 5 below). Bigger gatherings, requiring bigger camps did occur when up to 200 people gathered for ceremonial reasons and when the local food supply allowed. (see Figs. 5. & 6). These were not, and in fact could not have been, permanent settlements as the local food (and water?) supply was not sufficient to allow these large gatherings to be viable for more than a week or two at a time.

It is quite possible that the, ‘about one hundred native huts’ and the nearby water, mentioned in passing by Gellibrand was one such seasonal, ceremonial camp. Perhaps it did not raise a more detailed comment from Gellibrand because it was just empty, with no sign of life when Gellibrand passed by?

It is very unscholarly for Pascoe (and Ross Wissing) to just pluck this description out of its context and expand it to, ‘a settlement of 400 to 600 people’ (how was this calculated when no one was seen? - an average of 4-6 persons per hut for 100 huts?) and then claim this as evidence that Aboriginal people were commonly living in permanent settlements of over 500 people in Geelong.

Fig. 5 - Source : Dr Gary Presland’s ‘First People’, p.50. — **Fig. 5 - Source : Dr Gary Presland’s *‘First People’*, p.50.**

Fig. 6 - Source : Dr Gary Presland’s ‘First People’, p.67. — **Fig. 6 - Source : Dr Gary Presland’s *‘First People’*, p.67.**

Rebuttal #4 - Ross Wissing claims,

‘‘While the Wadawurrung erected their settlements working with the underlying ecological processes, the Europeans who followed did not. Whether it is retrofitting existing suburbs or building new ones, it is now acknowledged that several of Geelong’s suburbs need to change in their ecological perspectives, values and characteristics.’

We ask, what does this even mean? Where is the specific evidence to support and explain this? Is this just Post-modern gobbledygook?

Rebuttal #5 -

Ross Wissing bases his claims for the 5,000 to 40,000 years of Wadawurrung Balug sustainable occupation of The Kardinia Creek Living Station area on the work of one, L.N.Lane, for whom he provides six references in his Bibliography. Unfortunately, all six references are unpublished works, so we cannot verify his claims from these sources. One might ask, ‘Were they unpublished because they were unacceptable rubbish and refused by publishers?’ Who knows.

The other two references he cites for the age claim of, ‘quite probably over 30,000 years’, are by Dr Shaun Canning here and here.

Dr Canning’s work looks very good. One of his papers he says, ‘took several years to write’ and he had it reviewed by several professionals in the field so we are more confident that it is reliable. Unfortunately for Ross Wissing however, one thing it seems Dr Canning doesn’t refer to at all, is the Wadawurrung Balug’s sustainable occupation of The Kardinia Creek Living Station, let alone them occupying the area for 30,000 years.

Indeed, he is most emphatic that,

‘Ethnographic narratives are often used in the creation of models of Aboriginal land use. While this is not problematic when the land use model is concerned with historically known periods, projecting more recent ethnographic phenomena back in time is highly problematic’

- Canning, S. (2009) Broad scale paleo-environmental reconstructions of southern Victoria, Australia.’, The Artefact 32, in Abstract.

In other words, it is total rubbish (highly problematic in Post Modern speak) for Ross Wissing and Bruce Pascoe to claim that what Aboriginal people were observed to be doing in 1830, was what they must have also been doing 5,000 or 30,000 years ago. Unless they can provide firm archaeological evidence, they are just guessing and ‘making stuff up.’ (Ref. 2)

For example when Dr Canning writes,

‘The earliest traces of human occupation of the [western] region indicates that Aboriginal people were utilising the Maribyrnong valley at least 30,000 years ago.’ (ibid., p6),

he backs this claim up with reference to the archaeological evidence on these sites in the Maribyrnong valley. It is not valid for Ross Wissing to claim that Aboriginal people ‘quite probably’ occupied The Kardinia Creek Living Station area [in Geelong] over the past 30,000 years, unless he can provide some archaeological evidence to support this.

As Dr Canning also says in his paper,

‘The paleoclimatic and archaeological evidence tend to suggest that the [western Basalt plain] environments have not always been attractive for human habitation as they would now appear. At various points in time throughout the the last 30,000 years, the plains have oscillated between highly favourable loci for human activity to decidedly unfavourable. The ethnohistorical accounts derived over the past 200 years provide a useful and analogous tool for constructing models of recent Aboriginal use patterns. However, ethnographically based models should be limited to the ethnographically known past.’ -(ibid., p12)

So, ‘Dr to be” Wissing, ethnohistorical accounts derived over the past 200 years are fine for discussing sustainability models for the Aboriginal, Chinese and European and Australian societies in the Kardinia Creek Living Station area during that period. But if you want to lay claim for the sustainability of an Aboriginal ‘winter residential settlement for the Wadawurrung Balug for at least 5,000 years…quite probably over 30,000 years…and maybe 40,000 years, you will need to provide firm paleoclimatic and archaeological evidence going back to into these Deep Time periods.

Rebuttal #6 :

We are not sure why Ross Wissing is using European crop yields from the Medieval Period as a valid proxy to compare with higher yielding Chinese horticultural yields in Geelong to support his argument that European/Australian farming in Geelong was ecologically inferior. We note that the current Victorian wheat yields (seed harvested versus seed sown) are 25 to 33 times (Wheat sown at 60- 80kg/ha of seed to yield 2,713,000 MT per 1,294,000 ha = 2000kg/ha).

Reference 1: Broome, R., Aboriginal Victorians, Allen&Unwin, 2005, p.91

Reference 2 : ‘Many academic experts also believe Dark Emu romanticises pre-contact indigenous society… It’s a criticism most are reluctant to air publicly, given the sensitivity of contradicting a popular indigenous historian, although even [writer Bill] Gammage chuckles at some of Pascoe’s loftier claims about stone age Aborigines inventing democracy and baking. “I wouldn’t push these things too far,” Gammage says. “We don’t know what was going on in the world 65,000 years ago.” - Guilliatt, R., The Weekend Australian Magazine May 25, 2019

Reference 3 : And who is ‘Dr to be’ Wissing’s co-author? Foundation Professor of Environmental Planning & Landscape Architecture at Deakin University, Dr David S Jones. Tutt tutt.